Discipline Is Destiny by Ryan Holiday
Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Publilius Syrus
Freedom, as Eisenhower famously said, is actually only the "opportunity for self-discipline."
Emerging from the war, he was a victor of victors, having achieved conquest at a level no man-at-arms ever has or hopefully will ever again. Then, as president, overseeing a newfound arsenal of nuclear weapons, he was literally the most powerful human being in the world. There was almost no one or nothing that could tell him what to do, nothing that could stop him, no one who did not look up at him in admiration or away from him in fear. Yet his presidency involved no new wars, no use of those horrible weapons, no escalation of conflict, and he left office with prescient warnings about the machinery that creates war, the so-called military-industrial complex. Indeed, Eisenhower’s most notable use of force in office came when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to protect a group of black children on their way to school for the first time. And where were the scandals? Public enrichment? Broken promises? There weren’t any. His greatness, like all true greatness, was not rooted in aggression or ego or his appetites or a vast fortune, but in simplicity and restraint—in how he commanded himself, which in turn made him worthy of commanding others. Contrast him with the conquerors of his time: Hitler. Mussolini. Stalin. Contrast him even with his contemporaries: MacArthur. Patton. Montgomery. Contrast him with his peers of the past: Alexander the Great. Xerxes. Napoleon. In the end, what endures, what we truly marvel at, is not the ambition but the self-mastery. The self-awareness. The temperance.
As a young man, Eisenhower’s mother had quoted him a verse from the Book of Proverbs, "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty," she had told him, "and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." She taught him the same lesson that Seneca himself tried to instill in the rulers he advised, that "Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." And so it goes that Eisenhower quite literally conquered the world by conquering himself first.
It is through discipline that not only are all things possible, but also that all things are enhanced. Name someone truly great without self-discipline. Name one calamitous undoing that was not, at least in part, rooted in a lack of self-discipline. More than talent, life is about temperament. And temperance.
Not because he was never injured or sick, but because he was an Iron Horse of a man who refused to quit, who pushed through pain and physical limits that others would have used as an excuse. At some point, Gehrig’s hands were X-rayed, and stunned doctors found at least seventeen healed fractures. Over the course of his career, he’d broken nearly every one of his fingers—and it not only hadn’t slowed him down, but he’d failed to say a word about it.
He worked harder than anyone. "Fitness was almost a religion to him," one teammate would say of him. "I am a slave to baseball," Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play.
As a rookie, Joe DiMaggio once asked Gehrig who he thought was going to pitch for the opposing team, hoping perhaps, to hear it was someone easy to hit. "Never worry about that, Joe," Gehrig explained. "Just remember they always save the best for the Yankees." And by extension, he expected every member of the Yankees to bring their best with them too. That was the deal: To whom much is given, much is expected. The obligation of a champion is to act like a champion . . . while working as hard as somebody with something to prove.
"I guess the streak’s over," a pitcher joked after knocking Gehrig unconscious with a pitch in June 1934. For five terrible minutes, he lay there, unmoving, dead to the world—death being a real possibility in the era before helmets. He was rushed to the hospital, and most expected he’d be out for two weeks even if the X-ray for a skull fracture came back negative. Again, he was back in the batter’s box the next day. Still, you might have expected a hesitation, a flinch when the next ball came hurtling toward him. That’s why pitchers will bean a batter from time to time—because it makes them cautious, the batter’s instinct for self-preservation causes them to step back, in a game where a millimeter may make all the difference. Instead, Gehrig leaned in . . . and hit a triple. A few innings later, he hit another. And before the game was rained out, he hit his third . . . while recovering from a nearly fatal blow to the brain. "A thing like that can’t stop us Dutchmen," was his only postgame comment.
Just a sample of Gehrig’s schedule in August 1938: The Yankees played thirty-six games in thirty-five days. Ten games were doubleheaders; in one case, there were five consecutive days of them. He traveled to five cities, covering thousands of miles by train. He hit .329 with nine home runs and thirty-eight RBIs. For an athlete to do this without missing a game, without missing an inning, in their midthirties, is impressive. But Lou Gehrig did it as the early stages of ALS ravaged his body, slowing his motor skills, weakening his muscles, and cramping his hands and feet.
It was Churchill who told the young boys at Harrow School to "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty . . . Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
The funeral lasted just eight minutes. Looking out over the man’s friends and teammates, the priest found a flowery eulogy unnecessary. "We need none," the preacher said of the man, "because you all knew him." No tribute was needed, his life, his example, spoke for itself.
Updated: Dec 30, 2022
"Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact," she’d later reflect, "where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense."
There she was, starting her first novel in 1965, freshly divorced, thirty-four years old and struggling as one of the few black women in an incredibly white, male industry. Yet in her mind, this was "the height of life." She was no longer a child, and yet for all her responsibilities, everything was quite simple: Her kids needed her to be an adult. So did her unfinished novel. Wake up. Show up. Be present. Give it everything you’ve got. Which she did. Even after The Bluest Eye was published to rave reviews in 1970. She followed it with ten more novels, nine nonfiction works, five children’s books, two plays, and short stories. And she earned herself a National Book Award, a Nobel Prize, and a Presidential Medal. Yet for all the plaudits, she must have been most proud of having done it while being a great mother, a great working mother.
"Few figures in public life have had Dwight D. Eisenhower’s willpower," the biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote. "A lifetime smoker of three to four packs of cigarettes a day, Eisenhower quit cold turkey . . . and never touched a cigarette again." "The only way to stop is to stop," he would tell an aide, "and I stopped." No one "made him,"—no one could have—but he saw it as his duty to enforce it on himself. It would add years to his life. And by protecting and mastering his body, it allowed him to be of service to the world, first leading NATO and then assuming the American presidency, in a fraught and tense period. But what about you? What are you hooked on? What do you have trouble doing without?
As the novelist Gustave Flaubert commands: Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Clean up your desk. Make your bed. Get your things in order. Now get after it.
Because it was in accordance with his favorite saying, festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. As we learn from the historian Suetonius, "He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness," Suetonius wrote. "And, accordingly, favorite sayings of his were: ‘More haste, less speed’; ‘Better a safe commander than a bold’; and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.’ "
"Slowly," the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez would say, "you do everything correctly." That’s true with leadership as well as lifting weights, running as well as writing. Hustle isn’t always about hurrying. It is about getting things done, properly. It’s okay to move slowly . . . provided that you never stop.
Joyce Carol Oates worked and taught. Taught and worked. She published. "I come from a part of the world where people did work rather than just talk about it," she said. "And so if you feel that you just can’t write, or you’re too tired, or this, that, and the other, just stop thinking about it and go and work."
Updated: Jan 05, 2023
Yet every so often, for a few days, he would eat only the scantest fare and wear his coarsest clothing. He would actively seek out discomfort, mimicking abject poverty and harsher life conditions. He slept on the ground and deprived himself of everything but bread and water. Now, you might think that this is just a precious, even condescending hobby for privileged people, like ice baths or camping. But it was a lot more than that. First off, Seneca took pains to make sure the struggle was serious. "The pallet must be a real one," he wrote to a friend advising him to try this voluntary discomfort, "and the same applies to your smock, and your bread must be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes more, so it is a genuine trial and not an amusement."
To last, to be great, you have to understand how to rest. Not just rest, but relax, too, have fun too. (After all, what kind of success is it if you can never lay it down?) The most surefire way to make yourself more fragile, to cut your career short, is to be undisciplined about rest and recovery, to push yourself too hard, too fast, to overtrain and to pursue the false economy of overwork.
How did he do it? How did he not only survive but emerge unbroken, undaunted, from this experience? His family motto tells us: Fortitudine vincimus. By endurance we conquer. Fittingly, this was the name of his ship as well: the Endurance.
Updated: Jan 08, 2023
An observer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped that the man had a "second-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Given what disease took from Roosevelt’s body, the truth of the remark is all the more illustrative: Temperament is everything. Our head and our heart combine to form a kind of command system that rules our lives.
An observer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped that the man had a "second-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Given what disease took from Roosevelt’s body, the truth of the remark is all the more illustrative: Temperament is everything. Our head and our heart combine to form a kind of command system that rules our lives.